something beautiful: me

oh you guys.  this woman.  she is amazing and gorgeous and talented and strong and brilliant and the woman whose prayers and talks and advice and wisdom saved me on my darkest days (read: years).

she is my mom.  and she has not had an easy life, an easy marriage, or an easy bunch of kids to raise (SIX, might I add).  she has earned every wrinkle, every gray hair, and every twinkle in her eye, so I promised her I would not touch them so you could see her as her truest self.  and I may be showing a bit of favor to this woman, but isn't she the most beautiful creature you've ever beheld? 

Today, I'm not sure I find much to love about myself. I feel weak and sad and empty. But that is just today and I trust I won't feel as bad tomorrow. Usually I can love that I have been making progress in this life. Especially recently life has handed me some unexpected blows, but I can honestly say that the pain has helped me learn and grow. So, I love that I'm able to do that, that I can face the day and move forward. I love that I have compassion. It is a gift that some don't have and I feel blessed to feel it and to share it with others around me. I love how much I love my children, how amazing is a mother's love. Another gift. 

What makes me real? That I have as many heartaches as the next woman, that I long for love, that I find comfort in hiking, that I feel like a mountain top is about as close as I can get to God. I am real because  I have been an imperfect person. I am full of mistakes and faults and good and bad and love and joy and sorrow. I am a human and I live a complex life but I am grateful for all the good and even some of the bad that has been my experience. 

What advice do I have? Love God, love yourself, love others. In that order. Take care of yourself, don't ever dismiss your sense of right and wrong. Listen to your gut. Believe it. Be kind to others. Love your children fiercely. Stay connected with friends - when you least feel like connecting with a friend make the effort to do it anyway. Talk about your struggles, your hurts, your challenges, don't try to get through life on your own. 

How did I overcome my insecurities? I don't know that I have. But I'm better. I realized that I am worth buying a dress at full price.  I realized that I can risk being rejected. I can talk to strangers, I can be alone, I can feel pain and not die. I can be happy. What matters is what I do right now, not what happened in the past or will happen in the future. 

 thank you for being so incredible mom.

reality is: i'm beautiful.

still haven't decided on a name for this series yet.

so we'll switch back and forth until we decide.

me, that is.

unless of course you have an opinion you'd like to share with the class?

(but in a good way, not like the way your teacher made you tell your secrets out loud)

okay, but for reals, here she is.  the beautiful, the talented, the swimmer that just shaved a minute off of her time, the absolutely stunning.

SABRINA.

seriously though, can you even handle that smile?  those eyes?  that beauty?  it's ridiculous, really.  and its also the reason I asked her if she'd be part of this series.

Sabrina is a senior and swimming her little heart out right now on the swim team for her school. photographing beauty has never been so easy.

I thought at first I would get to know them, or have people nominate who would be next on the series (which may still happen), but I thought it would be more meaningful, more REAL, for the beauties that I photograph to discover for themselves what makes them beautiful.  wouldn't that change so much about how we feel about ourselves?  if we just spent some time each day thinking about what makes us beautiful?

so without further ado, meet the wonderful Sabrina.

well.... What I love about myself is that Im positive and love to smile. I have learned that the more you smile the more you can shine and help others day by just smiling at them. I laugh at anything at any moment (my friends make fun, but I know thats why they love me) and I just love that Im happy! It took a long time to figure out how much of a beautiful person I am, and everyone who is around me. Heavenly Father - I believe - helped a lot and because of Him I am this person today... trials and hardship he gave unto me because I know he loves me, and because of that Im beautiful. 

What makes me REAL is that Im responsible (I know... borriinnnggg) but I am totally mature - 60% of the time... gotta leave some room for sooommmeee immaturity! Also, I know whats around me, my surrounds are always in my peripheral. Im not naive... my spirit has grown so much in these last 5 years, and I know that with these experiences Im supposed to help others; thats why I want to be a nurse but its also what makes me an easy-going friend. 

MY WEAKNESSES!!!!! Im quite emotional haha but seriously... I am the world worst direction giver ever! No one listens to me anymore because of it. I have had tooo many incidents where I have given the wrong directions but swear up and down that they are right. So now when I tell someone to go left, they will go right. 

Blonde Moments aka Sabrina Moments as my friends might say!

To explain further.... On day in history class we were watching a video of the settlers here in America. On the screen it says, "10,000 bison roam free," and they show the image of these animals running across the plains. I lean over to my friend, Trenton, and ask, "They're extinct... right?" He gives me the weirdest look and answers back, "No, buffalo still exist." My smart little self tells him they arent talking about buffalo... He just laughs and says "Ohhhh Sabrina". 

Now that Im in swim... When I get home I mostly sleep or finish up with homework or even read a book. But I love to draw and hair and stuff (girlie things haha) Im just a multi-colorful person inside and out!

thank you sabrina!

this is seriously the best.

something beautiful: me.

psyche!  this isn't me.  it's my sister.  and yes, she's smokin' hot.

when we were little everyone always said she looked just like mk&a (serious props to those of you cool enough to know EXACTLY who I'm talking about without clicking)

I used to think she was a pest.
I think its because I was jealous I didn't look like I could solve any crime by dinner time.

when we were in college she conducted an experiment wherein she joined the likes of Blossom, complete with giant sunflower straw hats and socks with floppy animal ears to see if everyone would treat her the same.

I think that's when she discovered her love for fashion and/or design because that experiment KILLED her.

now she's in Northern California livin' it up in the most beautiful place I've ever been.

this picture was taken 4 months after she had her second little boy.

she makes a stand for what she believes in,

and she's passionate.

so passionate that sometimes she could be considered stubborn.

Now she's an interior designer with an eye like NOTHING I've ever seen before.  She's absolutely, positively gifted. you know, like bobby fischer was at playing chess? but at design.  

she's got that eye.

she's strong.

and she's stunningly beautiful.

and so she inspired me.

I'm starting..... 

(drum roll please)

..........................

a new blog series!

called:

therealityis: i'm beautiful

or maybe I'll stick with

something beautiful: me.

what say ye?

I'll pretty much do what I just did.  spotlight a beautiful person, take a picture of them, and tell you what makes them imperfectly real and perfectly beautiful.

and I couldn't be more psyched about it.

reality is: I'm loving my new hobby.

I found this photographer the other day and her philosophy really rang true to me.  this is absolutely, positively, what I want to capture in my photographs.

{via tarawhitney.com}

so here's a few that are spot on with each personality.

 (my amazing sister edited this one.  she also featured me 

yesterday on her blog.  check her out here.)

I'm pretty downright pleased.
(I speak in a southern accent when I get excited)

if you want christmas photos of your family wrangling a cow or flying in your swim goggles, I'm your girl.

also! more photos on my pinterest page.  check them out here.

best things this week

this week has been pretty rough.  borderline awful.  so, in attempt to round house kick this bad attitude in the face, I'm going to tell you some of the awkward and awesome happenings this week, to steal a phrase that couldn't be more perfect.

AWESOME
hubs got his refill of cindy crawford's meaningful beauty products in the mail yesterday.  two fold funny because 1: it reminded me of when he got sucked into that infomercial like a cheerio into a vacuum cleaner and tried to tell me about how I would have too. "its this melon that's only found in one place on EARTH with a shelf life of 16 years!", and 2:  he's obviously not the one who orders things online normally because he totally didn't know that they automatically sign you up for shipments every month for the rest of your life.

AWKWARD
standing in one side of my in-laws sink wearing hubs oversized flip flops while madly plunging the other side (with a TOILET plunger...ugh) to unstop the overflowing sink that was caused by hubs juicing beets the night before.  after letting it (the plunger) drip dry, I carried it across the floor where it almost immediately dumped nasty poop/sink water on the floor.  the beav immediately ran over, slipped in it, and nearly concussed himself (plural for concussion) he hit his head so hard.  what. a. day.

AWESOME
I was asked to photograph a PAYING client yesterday.  this is monumental.  and no, it's not my mom.  but almost.

AWKWARD
turning on the oven to bake some cookies and not remembering until I nearly burn the house down that the oven is where my mother-in-law keeps her PACKAGED bread goods.  TWICE.  I've now ruined approximately 5 english muffins, ten croissants, three loaves of bread, three biscuits, and quite possibly, and oven.  hubs hurried and destroyed the evidence to save me from embarrassment.

how does that song go?  fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me?

AWESOME
family has mad skills.  my brother decided to BUILD copies of this and this.  check it.
ps. these are the copies.  He measured, bought, stained, and affixed all the wood (and metal) to create the items below.

mad skills?  most definitely.

AWESOME
the beav is starting to learn how to dribble.  a ball, not saliva.  hubs bounces it while he tries to imitate him and dances around the room.  so cute.  Have I told you his first word was CATCH?  should I just get a minivan now and get it over with?

AWESOME

taking these pictures of my brother.  hot off the press.  and really, could he get any better looking?  He litterally ROLLED out of bed and threw on a shirt. ridiculous.


everyone should make an awesome and awkward, it really changes your day!  thanks for the idea syd.

haven't mentioned this in a while, but I'm still on the road

I remember my mom telling me {what felt like} a hundred times, in a very gentle and concerned way, that she thought I had a problem.  I remember blowing her off because I was just being "healthy".  I remember lying to my best friends.  I remember hiding.  I remember stealing food from my roommates because I never bought groceries.  I remember feeling so completely alone.  I remember trying desperately to stay away from the ice cream in the freezer, and then scraping the bottom of the carton with my spoon.

but some things I'm beginning to forget.  maybe that's just part of healing, but sometimes it scares me to forget because there is power in remembering.

journaling would have really helped me out here, but most people don't think to write about the times they ran to the bathroom after they ate the state of Montana.

A few months ago I read Mockingjay, and I read this passage.  with each sentence I felt a pang of familiarity.

While Cressida and Pollux make fur nests for each of us, I attend to Peeta’s wrists. Gently rinsing away the blood, putting on an antiseptic, and bandaging them beneath the cuffs. 

“You’ve got to keep them clean, otherwise the infection could spread, and –”

“I know what blood poisoning is, Katniss,” says Peeta. “Even if my mother isn’t a healer.”

I’m jolted back in time, to another wound, another set of bandages. “You said the same thing to me in the first Hunger Games. Real or not real?”

“Real,” he says. “And you risked your life getting the medicine that saved me?”

“Real.” I shrug. “You were the reason I was alive to do it.”

{oh this makes me so excited about the movie!!  for those of you that haven't read this book, read it.  the first two at least.}

I remembered that I used to be just like Peeta.  I would have to say to myself what my perception was and then decipher {sometimes with the help of others} if that perception was reality.  most of the time it wasn't.  I remembered the times I played this game after I ate a meal or wanted to weigh myself.  this very game sustained me when I stood at the beginning of the road, looking down a dirt path that went up and down and up and down and even when I squinted my eyes and looked real hard at the horizon, I never saw the sign that said, "recovery road ends in .5 miles".  but I just started walking.  and I played that game a lot for a while.  it was a big day when I had more reals than not reals.  

when I first started recovery, I wasn't like most people.  I was DONE.  done being a liar, done hurting myself, done pretending everything was okay, done feeling guilty ALL.THE.TIME. because I knew deep down this was all wrong.  It always felt wrong.  even when the comparisons told me it wasn't, I still knew it was wrong in my bones, and in my irritability, and in my self-loathing.  I was done, and I was willing to do anything and everything to be done for good.  that's not so different than most people in recovery.  what was different is that I felt that same way on day one, and on day two, and then day fifteen, then fifty, on day three hundred and sixty-five, and then today.  

let me tell you, recovery feels SO good.  its so nice to have the ability to make choices again.  it so good to be able to be closer to that horizon and turn around and see how far I've come.  

but DANG its hard. and I've still got a lot of road left.

ready, set, notice: where i am

Good morning!  Today we're lucky enough to learn from one of the coolest people I know.  Natalie is just making the transition into a family of FIVE kids with one little boy just weeks old.  her husband is a busy busy financial advisor, and leaving for work before the kids wake up and coming home well after the kids are in bed is not a rarity.  she just survived the dreaded school science fair, she's always working on new home makeover project, and yes, she cans her own poultry.  see the picture below if you don't believe me.  if you missed her profile, get to know her a little more by clicking here. Here's what happened when she stepped away from canning and noticed.

(picture provided, without permission, by where i am)

There’s a voice that has moved into my head.  He’s pulled up a chair, grabbed himself a snack and decided to set up camp.  Permanently.  In fact, when Remi gave me the task of ‘noticing’ he started speaking to me more loudly and clearly than he ever has before.  He’s not a voice that I like to listen to but he’s just so loud and obnoxious.  When he is yelling at me he talks with his mouth full, he burps, he farts, and if I could see him, I bet he would have moles all over his hairy back and sweat a lot when he sleeps.  All of those things would be forgivable if his intentions weren’t to be destructive to my soul.  But they are.  And in my assignment to simply notice, I came to know his intentions all too well.

When I embarked on my task of noticing I was excited to see what would show up.  What things would pop out from right under my nose that I could come to love and appreciate even deeper or possibly for the first time. I looked at nature.  Didn’t notice anything different.  Looked at people.  Didn’t notice anything different.  Looked at concepts and tried to conform them into an ‘experience’.  Nada.  Then I looked at myself and the Voice helped me notice plenty.  Plenty of things that I needed to work on.  (yikes!)  As the week progressed he helped me ‘notice’ that I wasn’t enough.  Wasn’t grateful enough.  Wasn’t proficient enough.  Wasn’t keeping up on the laundry enough.  Wasn’t meeting my children’s needs enough.  Wasn’t giving our pet chinchilla enough attention.  I wasn’t skinny enough or pretty enough.  Wasn’t being a good enough friend.  Wasn’t fun enough.  Wasn’t smart enough. Wasn’t being a good enough daughter or sister.  Wasn’t making dinner enough.  Wasn’t grocery shopping enough.  Wasn’t being kind enough to my husband.  The signs were everywhere.  I wasn’t enough.  I just wasn’t.  (enough doesn’t sound or look like a real word when you say/type it a whole bunch of times)  Well, thanks to the Voice I realized that this task of writing about the things I came to notice would be easy.  The voice would write it for me and it would go like this:  “I suck. The end.”  I didn’t have to write anything.  No editing.  No worrying about what I just revealed about myself to the cyber world.  Easy enough.  This voice takes such good care of me that way.

But then another voice started showing up.  The Opposition.  Because I do believe that there is that:  Opposition in all things.  And the opposition: the Opponent, the Challenger, started showing me some things to take note of: to challenge.  And this Voice showed me things in the gentlest of ways.  It didn’t burp at me, yell at me, or sweat in my bed.  It was beautiful, calm, piercing and I knew that what it was teaching me was true.  It didn’t hunker down in my head and stay there.  It eased into my blood and flowed through the deepest parts of Me.  Warming me until I knew that this Voice was the one that I needed to pay attention to, even if it was so much quieter than the voice I had given away my power to all week long.

I was driving to the store late one night.  It was the first time I had left my new baby and was alone.  I was exhausted from the lack of sleep combined with the new, tricky transition into life with 5 children.  I was in pajamas (from the night before), wearing a spit up stained t-shirt, and bandana on my head to cover up my greasy hair.  (You can imagine the hay-day the voice in my head was having with me.) I was listening to a talk on the radio and heard a story recounted.  My Soul Voice quietly told me to listen up because there was a message in it just for me.

It was a true story of a jumbo jet that crashed over the Everglades 36 years ago.  The interesting thing about this story is that the plane could have landed safely in Miami, just over 20 miles away.  But during the final descent of the flight, the crew noticed that a little green light failed to illuminate. The light indicated whether the nose landing gear had successfully extended.  The pilots decided to investigate the lights failure and put the plane in a holding pattern and circled above the Everglades.  All of the crew members were so distracted by the examination of the little green light that no one noticed that the plane had begun to descend until it was too late.  The plane crashed into the swamp below and over one hundred people lost their lives.  Investigators determined that the plane was in perfect mechanical condition at the time of the crash.  The nose landing gear was functioning properly that night.  The problem:  one tiny, burned out, green light bulb.  

When I heard that story I couldn’t help but think about how I had been feeling.  I realized that by listening to the voice in my head telling me over and over that I wasn’t enough, I was focusing on my little green light bulb; my flaws.  If this pattern of thinking continued what would be my demise?  Not the swampy everglades but feeling like a wreck of a mother to my five beautiful children who need me to be happy.  Who need me to love me.  Who need me to lead them by being an example of strength, dignity, grace and joy.  If I kept listening I wouldn’t be letting the voice ruin just me, but all of them too.  The price is too high to give him any more attention.

The next day, I read a blog post written by one of my friends.  I’m sure to her it was just a quick vent to acknowledge and record her day.  But my Soul voice told me to pay attention so I did.  Her post read:

Today I was mean and grumpy and irritable and fed-up (when I wasn't being long-suffering, encouraging, patient, and attentive, because let's be honest, there was some of that, too) and I kept thinking about what Diana used to say all the time to her sister Eliza when they were growing up: "I love you, but I don't like you." Mostly directed (but not spoken aloud) to my kids. 

Here's hoping for a new week filled with liking my cheerful, non-teething, obedient, loving, neat and responsible children! 

When I read that post it hit me like a ton of bricks.  Mr. Moley-back voice said ‘you don’t like your kids either.  You were mean, grumpy, fed up and irritable too.’  But after I told him to quiet himself, I Listened and Saw what I was Supposed to see.  “…when I wasn’t being long-suffering, encouraging, patient and attentive…”  I was those things sometimes too.  When my friend acknowledged her strengths she wasn’t bragging or staking her claim on having perfection all figured out.  Nope, she was just saying ‘I’m not so bad.’  She was listening to her Soul voice, the one who tells her who she truly is.  It made me realize that there wasn’t any harm in acknowledging that in myself too.  I’m okay.  At least parts of me are enough.  

My Soul voice has gently, but pointedly, spoken to me many, many more times this week, each time teaching me to pay attention to the good in me.  Once while watching Little Women, many times while parenting my babies, many other times in being a wife and a friend and a daughter and a sister, sometimes while listening to the radio.  I’m happy to report that the obnoxious houseguest in my head has quieted himself now.  At times he stands at the window knocking and I ask him if he has anything constructive to tell me.  He usually sulks away silent.  He’s becoming more obedient when I tell him to shush.  He knows that my Soul Voice has moved in to stay and she likes to keep a clean house.  And he’s not welcome in her domain. 

So what did I ‘notice’ after all?  That I am hopelessly flawed.  I always will be.  But it is my flaws, my scars, my imperfections mixed together with my kindness, beauty, and amazing sense of humor (it’s true, ask my husband.  I’m one funny lady) that make up the whole of me.  My unique blend of imperfection always leaves room for unwanted house guests to move into my head and set up shop.  It’s my sacred job as a woman, as a human being, as a spiritual being to stop it before it taints my Soul.  You know what else I noticed?  That I am enough.  Being enough doesn’t equate to perfection or that mean that I have overcome all of my weaknesses or don’t have room to grow and improve every moment of every day.  But that my Soul Voice is right, I’m not so bad after all.

**********************************************************************************************************

didn't I tell you she is a delight?  and I'm here to second the motion by Natalie's husband that she is indeed, one funny lady.  

thanks Natalie!